


Beneath the Raptor's Wings: The Background Files

by Graywand



Series: Star Trek: Into the Inferno [2]
Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender, Star Trek, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Star Trek: Enterprise
Genre: Anthropology, Essays, Gen, Historical, Historical References, Long Live Feedback Comment Project, Multi, Recent African Origins of Modern Humans, Relationship Discussions, World War II, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-24
Updated: 2021-02-20
Packaged: 2021-03-16 08:01:57
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,176
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28953126
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Graywand/pseuds/Graywand
Summary: This is a collection of the errata, apocrypha, and informational posts that have ended up on the Spacebattles forums involving my Star Trek/Avatar: The Last Airbender crossover Beneath the Raptor's Wings. It will be updated as I go along, because I figure creating a central place to put those deleted scenes and mini-essays would be a good idea.
Relationships: Aang/Katara (Avatar), Katara/Chan (Avatar), Mai/Sokka (Avatar)
Series: Star Trek: Into the Inferno [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2123424
Comments: 3
Kudos: 6





	1. Who Azula Is

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first essay, cleaned up and expanded from the original Spacebattles post. It is written from an in-universe perspective of an Op-Ed in the mid-23rd Century.

Who Azula Is

by

By Dame Aileene Chen, FRSE, FrHIST, FBA, DBE

“…confronted with an insoluble task, namely, to conduct a war which they had not wanted under a Commander-in-Chief whose confidence they did not possess and whom they themselves only trusted within limits…and with complete and clear realization that this war would decide the life and death of our beloved Fatherland. They did not serve the powers of Hell and they did not serve a criminal, but rather their people and their Fatherland.”

- _Generaloberst_ Alfred Jodl (May 10, 1890-October 16, 1946) defense before the International Military Tribunal

Much has been made in the last century of the mental instability of Azula, one of the most controversial military and political figures of Sozin’s War and the events leading up to the Human-Romulan War (2156-2161) and while it is true that she suffered a mental breakdown towards the end of the war, it cannot justify efforts by her defenders in the years and decades since to use it as a backdoor towards rehabilitating her in the eyes of the public.

Let’s start with the obvious first point, that her breakdown proved, all along, that she was fragile and suffered from low self-esteem that caused her to lash out. For decades in the late 20th and early 21st Centuries CE that was considered a standard explanation, and such is it’s attractiveness it tends to still be considered a valid explanation by the general public even two hundred years later. Even in the 21st century, more and more research proved that the opposite was true. People who struggle with low self-esteem have trouble in many cases just doing things like their homework, let alone conquering a city. I can cite research, but more than that I know because I’ve had self-esteem issues my entire life. It’s also been used to explain Japanese war crimes during the Second World War, that they were taking out the institutionalized abuse of the late 19th to early 20th century Japanese school system on hapless Chinese and Korean peasants. The fact that they had, in fact, internalized the propaganda taught in schools about Japanese racial superiority, especially over Chinese and Koreans, goes a lot further towards explaining what happened. Their self-esteem was _unrealistically high._ Nothing else can really explain the mass rape and murder of between forty and _four hundred thousand_ men, women, and children in six weeks. Or two Japanese lieutenants holding an open contest, that was _proudly_ reported in newspapers, about who could murder one hundred people with a sword first (both of whom were found guilty at the Tokyo Trials before the International Military Tribunal for the Far Eastand executed). No one factor can entirely explain such a disaster, but ingrained unrealistically high self-esteem is certainly a large part of the equation

And it is unrealistically _high_ self-esteem that goes a long way towards explaining Azula. She believed with every fiber of her being that she was superior to her “weak, failed” elder brother. That she was superior to Long Feng, and that she possessed the locally grown equivalent of the divine right of kings. She was the one who was going to succeed Ozai, she was the woman who would preside over a united human race under her family’s dynasty. And that she deserved it, and anyone who disagreed was manifestly inferior. How else could they dare to question Fire Nation destiny? Or hers.

Let’s now turn our attention to the other main problem plaguing standard perceptions of Azula. The idea that she was simply too afraid of her father to even consider defying him, particularly in light of what happened to Zuko. Let’s first address the obvious problem with that entire scene. It is simply impossible for a high command limited to couriers and messenger hawks, without access to radio or telegraph, to micromanage a corps-level operation in that level of detail as far back as the capital. The tyranny of distance, as it had until the invention of radio by Guglielmo Marconi in 1901, would have forced decisions like that to be left to the local corps and theatre commanders. And given that level of impossibility, especially since the descendant technologies of Marconi’s invention were only introduced to Azula’s homeworld after first contact in 2155, the most likely explanation was that entire situation was deliberately concocted precisely to provoke Zuko into challenging him so Ozai could sadistically burn his own son and get rid of him. And given her extreme intelligence, and Ozai’s demonstrated lack of creativity and impulse control, it is entirely possible, indeed probable that even at twelve or thirteen, that Azula was the prime mover in that plot. It is, clearly irresponsible to point to that incident as indicative of Ozai’s standard response to being challenged on a point of military tactics. Indeed, Ozai and his predecessors only got as far as they did by giving his commanders, including Azula, their head. Both as a point of good tactics and lack of any other choice.

To quote Roberts on Adolf Hitler’s relationship with his generals:

“Yet the German generals who argued with, stood up to or even disobeyed Hitler were not particularly ill-treated, unless of course they had been involved in the Bomb Plot. They were dismissed, reassigned or retired for a few months, but they did not face the ultimate sanction, as anyone who displeased Stalin certainly did. On 21 February 1945 Albert Speer wrote to Otto Thierack, the Nazi Minister for Justice, saying that he wanted to testify as a character witness for General Friedrich Fromm, who had ‘maintained a passive stance’ towards the Bomb Plot and not warned the authorities about it. It is inconceivable that anyone other than a would-be suicide would do such a thing in Soviet Russia. (It did no good: Fromm was executed by firing squad in March 1945.) Just as no one was shot for refusing to execute a Jew, so German generals put only their jobs, rather than their lives, on the line when they crossed Hitler on a point of military principle. Very often they were brought back from enforced retirement to serve again, as happened to [Gerd von] Rundstedt three times. They might therefore have been ‘only obeying orders’, but they were not doing so out of a well-founded fear for their lives.”

The weight of evidence would certainly suggest that Zuko was the exception to the general rule, that there was no general threat of either loss of life or serious bodily harm for anyone who questioned Ozai’s plans in a staff meeting. Which makes Azula’s failure to follow her elder brother’s footsteps in challenging her father even more indefensible.

Even if she declined to stand up to her father, she could have deserted and deprived her father of the considerable military talents she carried. She _could_ have decided to just walk away, disappear into the mass of Ba Sing Se and Omashu’s civilian population and never raise so much as a blip on the sensors of human society ever again. She chose to serve loyally, _brilliantly_. In fact, she is consistently rated by military historians and even her own opponents as one of the finest practitioners of asymmetrical warfare the human race has ever produced. Her success in ensuring the fall of Ba Sing Se from within is consistently cited among the most brilliant operations in the history of human warfare. Tactical and strategic nous she continued to display in her operations after she recovered from her mental breakdown in 2154 CE.

She was also an ardent supremacist, one, who, like her father, she shared his determination to rule her world, even if she meant ruling over a world in ashes. Just as the historical record gives lie to the self-serving memoirs of the surviving members of the _Oberkommando der Whermacht,_ who insisted that they were only interested in fighting a good, clean war against the Allies for the survival of the German people. When they, and the troops under their command played a key role, or were at least complicit in, the “Holocaust by bullet” the murder of 1.5 million Jews through mobile death squads in the former Soviet Union. Her infamous proposal to deal with the Earth Kingdom by “taking their hope, and the rest of their lands, and burn it all to the ground,” is just as damning as the actions of Jodl, Keitel, Yamashita and their co-defendants before the International Military Tribunal and the International Military Tribunal for the Far East. Her actions certainly opened the door to the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians in Ba Sing Se during the three months of its occupation.

So, when she was finally made to answer for her crimes before the bar of justice, did she claim diminished capacity as proven by her mental breakdown at the end of the war? Yes. Did she claim to have operated out of fear of her life at the hand of Firelord Ozai? Yes. To paraphrase Roberts, a [woman] need not be truthful when pleading for [her] life.” But historians and the general public need not and should not take her words and the defenses put forward by her lawyers as a valid reflection of the historical record.

Jodl knowingly and willingly served a criminal, and the powers of Hell. And so, did Azula. And her noted skill and ability should not justify elevating her among the ranks of her contemporaries like the Southern Water Tribe siblings Katara and Sokka. Or her classmate Ty Lee just to name a few. Or an ambitious young Kyoshi Islander named Suki. Men and women who fought tirelessly their entire lives, both as civilians, in their home nation’s militaries, and as the legendary Starfleet and MACO officers their most remembered as, to ensure the survival of humanity and its allies. They were and are rightly celebrated and remembered throughout human space along with their other countrymen and women who fought alongside the sons and daughters of Earth to drive the Romulans back into their space.

Azula should be remembered too. But as someone who cared more about her own power above all. Even her own kind. She should be remembered because “those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it.”

_Dame Aileen Chen is a former Starfleet officer and Chichele Professor of the History of War at Oxford University._

Sources cited (not a complete list)

Roberts, Andrew. (2012). _The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War_. New York: Harper Perennial.


	2. Uncut Lecture from Chapter Twelve

A/N Here's the full, uncut lecture that found its way into Chapter Twelve, and was originally supposed to be in Chapter Ten. It was cut for pacing issues (and because my beta didn't think anyone would sit through the biology lesson). But since there is a lot of real-world scientific information here I decided to post it here if anyone was curious.

"Who among you is the most well-versed in the natural sciences?”

“That would be me,” Ty said. “And believe me, there are questions that I and the people who study such things for a living would dearly like answered. We can trace the evolutionary history of many of the species on our world. But humans, and a few other creatures: wolves, wildcats, some species of birds, just seem to appear out of nowhere in our fossil record. And we can only do that because they’re the ancestors of dogs and cats.”

One of those damned Sokka smiles appeared on Gonzales’s face. “You have basic evolutionary theory, then.”

“Of course,” Ty Lee said. “And we’ve figured out basic mechanics behind inheritance. Meaning both parents contribute to the offspring’s traits.”

“We have a place to start then,” he said before tapping a button on his padd. The screen changed from a map showing United Earth’s territorial extent to a map of what could only be described as slightly curved sticks.

The basic unit of heredity is referred to as the gene. The best definition for our purposes is ‘a unit of heredity that is transferred from a parent to offspring that determines some characteristic of said offspring.’ They decide every aspect of every organism in this room. We know a lot about the human genome. However, after nearly a century and a half of research, we still cannot say with absolute certainty how many genes there actually are in even humans, let alone vulcans, andorians, or anyone else for that matter. In humans, there are around forty-six thousand, and they are all organized on these,” he said, pointing at the screen. “Chromosomes. Every human cell has forty-six—twenty-three from the mother, and twenty-three from the father. When a male successfully impregnates a female, it is because one out of billions of spermatozoa deposited by that partner in that moment successfully penetrated an ova. That egg then prevents any other sperm, either from one partner or another partner soon after, from ever penetrating that particular egg. Which develops into a new organism that is born nine of our months later. Your genes on their chromosomes were shuffled in the process of forming those sperm and eggs, and halved. Fertile males continuously produce sperm from the time they hit puberty to the time they die and are always capable of impregnating a fertile female. Females, on the only hand, only have a few hundred eggs that were created while they were still in their mother’s womb. At least one egg is released roughly every twenty-eight to forty days from alternating ovaries during her courses. Your parents provided each and every one of you a set of chromosomes each during that shuffling process. Creating combinations that have never existed before and never will again, including a few entirely new combinations because genes mutate and change on their own. Your individual genetic makeup was formed in the shuffling of your parent’s genomes, just as theirs was formed in theirs, in an unbroken chain. Should you have your own children, that process will continue. It is on that process which evolution acts, to answer your question, Major.”

Ty Lee found herself nodding. It certainly made sense. Her world’s scientists had observed internal eggs, of course, in both humans and other creatures, but they were still debating their role in heredity. To have that answer confirmed like that.

“As it stands, however,” Rodriguez said, continuing, “not every gene is recombined. Only about five percent of the human Y-chromosome actually recombines with the X chromosome. The rest of it only mutates occasionally, and the fact that it does is very useful for tracing human origins through the paternal lines. The maternal line is tracked not through the X-chromosome but a cell’s mitochondria.”

“Their what now?” Sokka asked.

He tapped a button, and two circles appeared on the screen with stripes running down the middle. “Circular cell-shaped structures found in every human cell and the cells of most creatures that consist of more than one cell. Their function is to provide energy to the cell. Sperm cells have mitochondria, but they are stored in the tail, which breaks off when the head penetrates an egg. As a result, with very few exceptions, every mitochondria in every human cell is inherited exclusively through the mother. It is mutations in the mitochondria’s separate genome that thus allow us to track maternal lineages back in time. The full extent of which we can cover later. For now, though.” He tapped another button, and the map reappeared, focusing on the curved, jagged continent

“This is the continent that is today called Africa. It is just over thirty million kilometers square, it constitutes twenty percent of Earth’s land surface, and six percent of Earth’s total land area. It is also the birthplace of humanity. Every species related to or directly ancestral to modern humans had its origins, in part or in full, here. Between five hundred and fifty and seven hundred and sixty thousand years ago, the branch leading to modern humans, _Homo sapiens_ in our scientific nomenclature, diverged from another branch of the same species. That branch migrated into Eurasia and became what we call the Neanderthals, or _Homo neanderthalensis_ , a separate species from humans but related species. While in Eastern Eurasia, a branch of _Homo neanderthalensis_ diverged, and that would one day become _Homo altaiensis_ or Denisovan. Over the next three hundred thousand years, this species throughout the whole of Africa, transitioned into _Homo sapiens_ together _._ We became relatively more gracile than the thicker, stockier, stronger Neanderthals and Denisovans, with thinner bones, and teeth. By three hundred thousand years ago, human faces fell within the range of variation for modern humans, even if the backs of our skulls still had archaic characteristics. By one hundred thousand years at the very earliest, we had settled into being modern humans. We were dark-skinned with gracile bodies compared to the ones that came before us. We had all the cognitive aspects we all would recognize as being consistent with modern humans, as well. And…that’s where the story starts to get a little fuzzy. The fact that we’re all sitting in this room together, and two of you have extraphysical powers is proof of that. On my world, modern humans spread out from East Africa into Eurasia, Australia, and eventually the Americas. We succeeded in driving the other species to extinction, albeit with limited interbreeding, the traces of which can be found in the genes of populations beyond Africa. I can’t say the same for you. At all. Not yet, at least. But I propose we find out.”

“How?” Aang asked from down the table.

“All we need is a saliva sample,” Rodriguez said, leaning forward in his chair, with an excited look on his face that made him look more like an excited boy. Or Sokka. “A saliva sample, and we can process that sample and read the genetic code of everyone in this room. We can compare it to the genetic data we have on humans from Earth. From there, we should be able to tell from what population on Earth yours diverged from and when. If I had to guess, you diverged from the same East African population that gave rise to the rest of my world’s population at about the same time. Still, the only way to really be sure is to do the analysis. I would need to gather samples from a wide variety of people to truly answer some questions. Where humans on your world first settled, for example, and the precise details of how you spread across your world But even with just the saliva samples collected from you and your friends, sir,” he said courteously, “We can at least answer the question of how you relate to us, and probably have a place to start figuring out what gene variants are involved in your ‘bending’ abilities. This isn’t a proposal you have to make a decision on right away. But I strongly urge you to think about it.”

**Author's Note:**

> This story is part of the [LLF Comment Project](https://longlivefeedback.tumblr.com/llfcommentproject), which was created to improve communication between readers and authors. This author invites and appreciates feedback, including:
> 
>   * Short comments
>   * Long comments
>   * Questions
>   * Constructive criticism
>   * “<3” as extra kudos
>   * Reader-reader interaction
> 

> 
> This author replies to comments. If you would not like to receive a reply, please sign it "whisper."


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